Writer: Electra Kolb
Electra Kolb’s pre-Edinburgh Festival show Father, Away She Goes is given a brief try-out at the Etcetera Theatre in a 35-minute piece that explores the unreliability not just of the narrator, someone her mother labels a narcissist, but also of the faces we present to the world. An engaging study in ambition and manipulation, the two perspectives presented in the story need to be more fully blended together, but Kolb’s ability to play with the expectations of the audience is very promising.
Rejected from several art schools, Sarah Jones is livid, refusing to believe they have rejected her talent and dismissive of their insistence on more political subject matter. No longer living at home following multiple arguments with her mother and enjoying rent-free accommodation with a friend’s parents, Sarah has no intention of moving on until she gets the college place she knows she deserves.
Kolb’s play has a strong opener, an introduction to a young woman whose arrogance and self-belief override even the mildest of feedback on her talent and personality. Slowly unfolding particular traits and some of Sarah’s history, the creation of character, of someone resentful of any setback, admits to enjoying lying and claims to be bored by most people and things suggest a personality disorder of some kind, although in the second half of the narrative, Father, Away She Goes takes the story in another direction.
This part of the story comes with important trigger warnings for sexual assault, described in detail from when Sarah was 13 until the age of 17. It is hard to listen to, told with far greater vulnerability and humility than the character had shown so far, and Kolb is successful in showing the audience a different side to Sarah, and using that to shape the outcomes of the show, a year after her initial rejection by the art schools.
The transition between the two is a heavy though, a dramatic switch that makes the second half feel like a different show, even a different character altogether. Father, Away She Goes could sew these two pieces together more purposefully by allowing the two representations of Sarah to appear more noticeably in each other’s narratives. And that would provide a stronger platform to build towards the more ambiguous ending where Sarah’s motives and the complexity of who she might be come.
Kolb’s performance is well-pitched for a small space, bringing the audience into the character’s confidence quite quickly and playing both her self-belief and her girlishness well. The monologue direct to the audience is given variety with some sketchy impressions of other people in her story, both her own mother and her landlady, with Kolb entertainingly playing both sides of those conversations.
Extending the content would be a worthwhile exercise to fill an hour; more of Sarah’s manipulation, perhaps more of her family relationship and friendships (or lack of) would give this greater substance, providing the audience with further examples of her wider life and her ambition beyond an art degree, and that can only add to the ambiguity and complexity that Kolb is still creating.
Reviewed on 13 July 2025
